Urban Territories

28.09.2012 - 24.11.2012

0gms, Sofiya / Bulgaria

The exhibition “Urban Territories” questions modes of how cities are
constructed in terms of their architectural settings and the inherent social and
economic dynamics. How do past modes of living influence current conditions
or views on urban territories and the changes that have or have not taken
place? Utopias and desires, which in a Lacanian sense always come close to
reality, but in the end cannot be fulfilled, are at the basis of imaginary forces,
which determine people’s thinking and living....
The works in the exhibitions take specific urban topographies as the starting
point to reflect on the changes, which these social units were meant to bring
about and the sometimes dead-end scenarios in which people had to find
themselves. How do utopian concepts survive in the long run, or, how do
people’s beliefs in a certain system get overthrown after time? Aesthetic
values versus social use or political thinking are some of the issues raised by
the artists in the exhibition, who work in different thematic fields but here raise
the question to which extent urban territories were conceived in terms of their
functionality and how their original functions have not survived the demands
of present-day economic and social conditions.
How has our late capitalist system overthrown some of the beliefs of the
1960s, including architectural and societal issues, which declined due to the
ever-changing post-globalist and post-democratic demands on the individual?
Aesthetic and idealistic beliefs in an improvement of Foucault’s conception of
governmentality lead to a reflection of territorial issues, which the artists in the
exhibition examine from an intermediary perspective, gauging the effects
specific urban structures of the past have had on the present. The
functionality of these entities might have been visionary in the past, yet has to
be questioned in terms of present conditions of cohabitation and working
structures.

[Quelle: www.0gms.com]